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Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Pleasures of Research: Often Unexpected

by

Donn Taylor

One
of the joys of fiction writing is the research one does to make sure the
writing is accurate. Some of this comes through to the reader through settings
that have the ring of truth and through avoidance of anachronisms and other
errors. But for the writer—or for any other researcher—much of the pleasure
comes from things that may not make their way into the completed manuscript.
This pleasure comes from discovery of some odd truth one would never have
suspected when he began his research. Once in a while, though, such a discovery
leads to an entirely new project.

Such
was the case with the journalist Ronald Downing back in the mid-1950s. His
London newspaper had him researching the yeti, the Abominable Snowman of the
Himalayas. His research led him to an obscure Polish refugee, living in England,
who was said to have actually seen those strange creatures. The first interview
revealed a story more remarkable than the yeti, and other interviews over the
next year produced an equally remarkable book.

When
the Germans and Soviets invaded Poland in 1939, the Soviets arrested Slavomir
Rawicz, a young lieutenant of Polish cavalry. He was one of the lucky ones.
Instead of being summarily executed, he was tried, sentenced, and eventually
sent to a Soviet labor camp some 200 miles southwest of Yakutsk, in Siberia. He
and six other prisoners escaped from there and walked—yes, walked—south past
Lake Baikal, through the Gobi Desert and China, through Tibet into Nepal and
eventually into English hands. Several died along the way. And in the Himalayas
the survivors did see, in passing, creatures resembling the fabled yeti.

Thus
what had begun for Ronald Downing as one project became an entirely different one,
and he told Slavomir Ravicz’ story in a book titled The Long Walk (The Lyons Press, 1956, 1997). It is one of the most
fascinating books I have ever read, and I revisit it every few years.

My
own adventures in research have been less dramatic, but also filled with
unexpected discoveries. For The Lazarus
File, a novel of spies and airplanes in Colombia and the Caribbean, I spent
hours researching the Colombian terrain and weather. Somewhere in there I
stumbled onto the photograph of a lone house on top of a barren hill. The image
stayed with me and eventually grew into one of the chief features of my
fictional landscape, one that recurred throughout the novel.

In
researching my latest novel, Deadly
Additive, I was surprised to learn that during the 1980s, then-communist
Nicaragua’s airline was largely owned by the Palestinian Liberation
Organization (PLO), and that Peru’s Shining Path guerrillas were tutored by the
Abu Nidal terrorist organization.

There
is also satisfaction in research that prevents embarrassing errors. Some years
ago, my critique group had a good laugh over a novel whose protagonist drove
west out of Houston, Texas, and found himself immediately in the desert. (Five
hundred miles of prairie and Texas Hill Country had apparently disappeared from
the earth.) A quick glance at any atlas or encyclopedia would have saved the
author that error.

I
came close to making the same kind of error in The Lazarus File. The story told of several detailed flights in the
Douglas DC-3 aircraft, one of the most common aircraft used by drug smugglers.
I remembered an old movie in which James Stewart looked out the pilot’s window of
a DC-3 to see if his gear was down, and I thought that might be a good detail
to add. But caution prevailed. I managed to track down a flyable DC-3, talk
with the pilot, photograph the instrument panel, and sit in the pilot’s seat.
Lo and behold! The landing gear was not visible from the pilot’s seat. That
incident also taught me never to use a movie as a research source.

I’ve
been talking about research from a writer’s viewpoint, but anyone can enjoy the
pleasures of research, and it doesn’t have to be writing-related. There is a
certain satisfaction in just finding facts like, for instance, that Texarkana, Texas,
is closer to Chicago than it is to El Paso, or that President John Kennedy’s
1961 use of the term West Berlin with Premier Khrushchev (instead of simply
“Berlin”) convinced the Soviet leader he could do as he pleased in East Berlin.
And there is satisfaction in learning, while the Soviet archives were actually
open, the truth about questions Cold War historians had argued over for years.
(See, for example, John Lewis Gaddis’s We
Now Know.)

Research
does provide deep pleasure, but superficial research contains a danger voiced
long ago by the poet Alexander Pope:

A
little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

In
our researches, either for writing or for pleasure, let us all drink deeply and
avoid the embarrassment caused by shallow draughts.

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